Revised Intro to Melting Muscles Textbooks and E-books

 

I am currently rewriting the Melting Muscles workbook.  I will first publish the Atlas and Axis text, for the course coming up in Seattle on Nov 1.  The following is the revised introduction to Melting Muscles that will appear in the Atlas and Axis textbook later this month:

1. Part One -- Melting Muscles Review

(a) Overview Of Melting Muscles Technique

(i) Activates Healing From Within

Melting Muscles is a bodywork technique that releases muscle tension by invoking the brain to relax the muscles.

(ii) Muscles Respond Only To Brain Decisions

Muscles tighten only when the brain commands them to tighten. Muscles relax only when the brain commands them to relax. In the absence of new signals from the brain, muscles will continue to do as they were doing. Muscles will actively contract (or "guard"), day and night, and after death, if this is the last command that was given by the brain. Therefore the key to relaxing muscles is to alert the brain that relaxation is now the choice that serves best.

(iii) Melting Muscles Is A Method Of Equal Partnership

• Melting Muscles practitioner neither leads nor follows the recipient-they move in parallel, progress side by side.

• Practitioner follows the clues the brain left active in the muscles, follows the clues back to the brain, invites the brain to let down its guard, supports the brain as the tension is released, and celebrates the progress.

(iv) Melting Muscles An Indirect Techinque

1. Guarding is muscle contraction.

2. Muscle contraction acts to shorten muscles.

3. Therefore, by shortening her guarded muscle, practitioner demonstrates agreement with her brain's decisions.

4. Her brain realizes that, while the practitioner shortens her muscle, during this time there is no need for her to hold it guarded. While someone else is upholding the guard for her, she can afford to stop guarding during this time.

5. Within seconds of noticing the practitioner shortening her muscle, her muscle begins to relax.

6. Both practitioner and recipient may feel muscle softening and melting

7. When the brain relaxes muscle of its own decision, it is far more likely to uphold the new decision to relax. The results last.

8. When she is the one who relaxed her own muscle from within, the next day there is none of the soreness that mechanical softening might have caused.

(v) Ways Melting Muscles Differs From Osteopathy

1. Importance That Recipient Feels Change and Relaxation

   I have received and watched a number of sessions given by D.O. Osteopaths and their P.T. students. It appears the Osteopath is so sensitive that he can apply changes that the recipient is not subtle enough to value or sense consciously. The person often cannot feel a difference right away but trusts that the Osteopath has given them a healing of great value, and this generally turns out true. Melting Muscles, on the other hand, relies heavily on the feedback of the recipient. The practitioner says, "I feel your muscle melting, do you feel it?" It is important that the recipient feel that sinking, melting feeling, because this awareness of one's muscles relaxing (normally a subconscious process) now conscious, gives the recipient an added gift--self sufficiency they can take with them and use on their own, without the need for a therapist, whenever they feel tense. When a person has received a Melting Muscles treatment, whether it was a 5-minute demonstration at a sports event or a 90-minute session, they WILL feel a difference. There is no mistaking the profound sense of relaxation, worries and concerns reframed, wondering if it would be better to call a cab!

2. Offers Great Variety

• Degrees Of Subtlety On days when you're distracted, maybe you've had too much espresso before work, you don't really want to use a cranial assessment of their muscles nor a slow-motion treatment. To assess when you're having one of these days, you may check ROM to find which muscles are short, do a visual assessment, or simply go by the person's complaint. To treat when you're having one of those days, you simply shorten muscle before pressing. Maybe later the same day, or later in the same treatment, you find your balance again. You slow down and begin to feel the person's cranial muscle motion, which shows you where to work next. Your pressure transitions become smoother and you feel her muscles melting.

• Degrees Of Pressure Depth

• Degrees Of Challenge/Comfort

• Degrees Of Unwinding/Swedish

(vi) Short Term Benefits

• For The Recipient:

  • Ultra gentle techinque works below pain threshold. You can still feel muscles melt while using only the slightest pressure.

  • People who like deep work can still receive same deep pressure, only now they can feel their muscles release too.

  • Recipients can actually feel their muscles soften and relax.

  • Even if all the work was local, say on one forearm for an hour, still all the brain communication leaves the person systemically deeply relaxed, almost light headed--be sure they write the check on the way in because they won't be able to write numbers.

• For the Giver:

  • Less pressure necessary to get results

  • Easier on your hands and body

  • You get into a "zone" of relaxation

  • You feel more and more relaxed, the more sessions you do in a day

  • Your career can go as many decades as you want without burnout nor feeling like your reserves are being used up

(vii) Long Term Benefits

• For The Recipient:

  • Each time her brain decides to relax a muscle, she reinforces the truth that she is the one who has always had the ability and keys to her own health.

  • She gains more and more self-sufficiency. She is less and less dependent on an outside person to "relax" her.

  • She has more and more awareness to consciously relax whenever she so directs her mind.

  • She has more and more conscious awareness of the factors that triggered her guarding.

  • She has less and less judgment about what she guarded, replaced with simply doing the process of releasing.

• For You, The Practitioner:

  • The technique itself shows you far more than you can learn from the book or class.

  • Your hands become expert translators of the proprioceptive language used by brains and muscles.

  • Bodies trust you.

  • Your hands have confidence.

  • By guiding others to be aware of the keys of relaxation, you give yourself the same gift. You are more relaxed with less dependence on outside factors to "relax" you.

  • Your hands begin to feel the answers to questions like, "Why do I have a knot there?" "How long will it take me to release this?" "Why does this keep coming back?"

  • People are amazed how quickly and painlessly they can process and release old buried guarded issues with your technique.

(vii) Melting Muscles Relieves and Reverses Many Complaints (though the author is not a Doctor, is not trained nor licensed to diagnose, and does not mean to imply that any disease would be cured):

• Aging (triggering your PNS parasympathetic nervous system) gives you back years of quality living, healthier skin, nails, hair, better digestion, lower heart rate, better blood pressure, lower anxiety, deeper breathing

• Asthma, Allergies, Histamine Reactions, Chemical Sensitivity, Hyper Sensitivities

• Athletes: specific cramps at mile 22, low back pain for black belts, Tennis Elbow, Golfer's Elbow, etc.

• Atlas and Axis: ultra gentle release of obliquus muscles that were jamming these two joints, assessment and correction

• Brain: TBI brain injury, Stroke, MS, ALS, Encephalitis, Lyme, etc.

• Dancers (psoas)

• Emotional Release (release not in outbursts, but gradually and constantly leaks away, a gentle rivulet of release), PTSD, "Shell Shock," automobile accident trauma, major surgery (traumatization can reside for decades after anesthesia and surgery), past life trauma (encapsulated in pearl gray capsules in the hippocampus and medulla oblongata, regulated by the centrum and the cerebellum)

• Fatigue, CFS, Fibromyalgia, Candida, etc.

• Hip Rotators: The practitioner show assessment and correction

• Irritable Bowel or Poor Digestion

• I-T band (Tensor Fascia Latte, Gluteus Maximus)

• Job-Related Injuries, Stress, Overuse Injuries, Tendinitis, Carpal Tunnel (more likely wrist extensors), Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, tingling in the fingers, numbness, (pectoralis minor, scalenes, atlanto/axial joint, subscapularis), Sciatica, Bursitis, pain down the leg, numbness or tingling in the foot (piriformis, pectineus, TFL)

• Low Back Pain: assessment and correction for lumbar sidebenders

• Lumbar Rotation: Psoas is a lumbar rotator, assessment and correction

• Shoulder Rotator Cuff: assessment and correction for medial and lateral rotators

• Specific Muscle Work: work up to 90 minutes on one area without boredom and great results

• Type "A" personality, SNS (sympathetic nervous system) always on, "Fight Or Flight," Adrenaline Junkie, High Blood Pressure, Hypertension, Cold Hands and Feet, Sweaty Palms, etc.

• Yoga Practitioners and Teachers: overstretching injuries, low back pain (psoas,) loss of hip medial rotation (piriformis too tight, TFL too weak)

Theory -- How Muscles Melt

Assuming the nerves from the brain to and from the muscles are functioning properly, muscles will melt the moment the brain feels it is safe to relinquish guarding. What makes the brain feel safe?

Proprioception

The cerebellum is constantly processing proprioception--awareness of where the body is in space, so that it knows the appropriate tone, or amount of resting contraction, to command for each muscle group. Proprioceptors are located throughout the body in muscle and tendon tissue. Annulospiral receptors in muscles report position and acceleration back to the brain. Certainly if a person's limb were accelerating toward its end range with no sign of slowing down, (for example if, after twenty years a woman decided to heave a softball, during the windup she outwardly rotates her rotator cuff but doesn't have the strength in her subscapularis muscle to slow the acceleration as she nears the end of the windup, so she ends up "throwing her arm out") the cerebellum would react by increasing the muscle tone to protect the joint from tearing joint capsules, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. The cerebellum contracts all the muscles in the area night and day to splint and protect the joint that has been threatened, in its estimation. This guarding remains in place until the cerebellum makes a new decision. A new decision will not be made until proprioceptive evidence shows safety. However, this proprioceptive evidence is difficult to come by if the brain won't even let the arm move. So a vicious cycle is in place, and the sufferer really needs the help of an outside person to help the cerebellum make its first new decision about this.

One necessary condition for the brain to let down its guard is that it is sure that the practitioner moving her limbs and pushing on her tissues would never ever consider motions or speeds that remind her of the speeds and motions that originally threatened to tear her tissues. To help the cerebellum release guarding, a practitioner must:

• always use predictable transitions--

  • gradual buildup and let down of pressure

  • range of motion begins slowly and slows far before end range

• never pass that degree of range where the first hint of guarding appears (called the "pathological motion barrier" or "subtle motion barrier")

These practitoner practices help the brain feel even safer:

• responding to "cranial muscle motion," the subtle direction patterns that muscles are always demonstrating.

• hands that listen and respond, a two-way conversation.

• showing the body that you notice the ways it is sharing messages,

• communicating with the cerebellum in the angle-language of proprioception that it is most comfortable with

• applying other relationship qualities that create a safe relationship (come to our Ethics course, "Creating Equal Relationships" and look for a future e-book) like patience, presence, compassion, non-judgment, non-self-importance, curiosity, vulnerabilty, and generosity.

A Muscle Melts, Step By Step;

1. Guarding is not the preferred state. Guarding muscles requires nutrition energy, chemical messengers, and watchfulness--resources that must be taken away from other priorities. The body would prefer to have all its resources available for other tasks.

2. Guarding is a decision enacted for a good reason.

3. Guarding ennervates muscle contraction.

4. Muscle contraction attempts to shorten muscles.

5. Therefore, by shortening her guarded muscle, practitioner demonstrates agreement with her brain's decisions.

6. While practitioner shortens her muscle, her brain realizes there is no need for her to hold it guarded during this span. While someone else is upholding the guard for her, she can afford to take a break from guarding.

7. Within seconds of noticing the practitioner shortening her muscle, her muscle begins to relax.

8. Both practitioner and recipient may feel muscle softening and melting

9. The practitioner feel the muscle no longer "wanting" to shorten. Practitioner senses the joint now "wants" to return toward neutral.

10. The first signs of guarding are experimental--the brain hesitantly tests to see if anything bad happens, if anyone takes advantage of the relaxed state. If safety is maintained, relaxation continues.

11. The practitioner jostle or rub the muscle, which creates a pleasurable sensation celebrating choice to relax.

12. Relaxation is its own reward. While guarded, one cannot conceive of relaxing. Once relaxation is begun, one thinks, "why didn't I do this earlier! I want to relax more! I want to relax all the time!"

13. Relaxation accelerates.

14. Celebratory jostling and strokes noticed by her brain which responds with new signals and changes, Practitioner responds to these. Back and forth they communicate in a two-way, nonverbal conversation.

15. The practitioner "hears" the conversation through his hands feeling motion and palpation of density changing. Practitioner "speaks" his part also using his hands to move the body.

16. The practitioner continues to "say" the same message, "safety" but the message is always fresh as it is "spoken" from new angles, speeds, accelerations, vectors, and sensation states.

17. Relaxation lasts. If muscles are bullied into relaxing, the brain temporarily relaxes and tightens the muscles again during sleep. If muscles relax because the brain freely chose to relax, then relaxation only continues during sleep, and for several days the person relaxes more and more.

18. No additional muscle soreness the next day. If muscles are forced to soften; mechanically tenderized, there will be broken fibers and inflammation will be necessary to clean up the mess and bruising. However, if muscles relax from within, because of brain choices, then there are no broken fibers and no bruising to tend to.

19. No extra water to drink. Circulation improves immediately. Studies have shown that scooping and flushing massage does not move fluids. Fluids are trapped because capillary sphincters are contracting and muscles are contracting, which impedes flow. The moment muscles relax, flow increases dramatically. No flushing necessary. Drinking water is always a good idea but people will need no additional water after a melting muscles treatment.

Three Disadvantages of Melting Muscles.

• Some people want to receive what they feel has worked for them in the past. They will not want to try something different. Luckily, Melting Muscles can be easily "slipped in" to a more conventional Swedish relaxation massage.

• Some people bring beliefs about what works for them. They may think very deep pressure helps them relax, or quicker rubbing and stroking. Perhaps they feel pleasure from these strokes and they assume that pleasure is the same as relaxation. They bring expectations that you will do massage as they have received it before. Luckily, Melting Muscles works at any depth of pressure, from very light to very deep—it will just take you more practice to feel the muscles changing at depths you are not familiar with. Luckily, Melting Muscles works just as well during petrissage, efflourage, and other rubbing or jostling—it will just take you more practice to feel subtle movement at the same time that quicker, grosser movements are occurring.

• Some people assume it is the massage practitioner's responsibility to fix them as they lay there passively receiving pleasure. Some of these people are not comfortable with a practitioner who waits for their response (and no pleasurable input during the seconds of waiting). I find there is always a way to communicate safely, both verbally and nonverbally, my intention to help them. Often their body comes into agreement within seconds after initiating a Melting Muscles maneuver, even if their conscious mind finds flaws with it. A simple, "Do you feel how quickly your muscle is melting right now?" goes a long way to helping people reframe old conclusions.